Abstraction is a powerful servant, but a dangerous master. We code, design, think, debug ... on a tower of abstractions. Spolsky's Law tells us that "All abstractions leak". This talk explores why they leak, why that's often a problem, what to do about it; I also cover why sometimes abstractions SHOULD "leak", and how best to produce and consume abstraction layers.
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In his new talk Building Belonging, Jono Bacon explores the underlying recipe behind what makes great community and talks about many of the concepts that he and his team have used as part of the Ubuntu community. The presentation takes a fun, amusing and anecdote laden tour-de-force of community in a way that any community can implement. Be sure to be there!
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Ubuntu One isn't just a set of services for Ubuntu, it's a platform for you to build your own services too. Stuart Langridge explains the APIs Ubuntu One offers to developers and shows some examples of applications you could build that take advantage of storage in the cloud and synchronised databases for your apps: build your own on the desktop or the web to work collaboratively with Ubuntu One.
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wiiMote headtracking demos are a YouTube sensation and the technology is making its way from demos to production games and scientific visualization. Learn the theory behind wiiMote headtracking, see it in action, and imagine what you might do with it.
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A pervasive elitism hovers in the background of collaborative software development: everyone secretly wants to be seen as a genius. In this talk, we discuss how to avoid this trap and gracefully exchange personal ego for personal growth and super-charged collaboration. We'll also examine how software tools affect social behaviors, and how to successfully manage the growth of new ideas.
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In December, Rails announced it would merge with Merb, and that they would be working together to bring many of the salient elements of Merb into the next version of Rails. Yehuda Katz, the maintainer of Merb (now on the Rails core team), will walk you through what's new, with a special focus on modularity, performance, and a clean plugin API, three new points of focus for the framework
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So you've just finished writing the next big thing, but how do you convince people to use it and build community around it? This talk will illustrate how to use Ubuntu's Launchpad to distribute open source applications. Launchpad is project hosting with unique features that facilitate simple installations and upgrades leveraging the standard Debian distribution stack.
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What's it like to be a woman in an open source project that's 99% men? What's it like to be a woman in a project that's 75%... women? Kirrily Robert, who has worked on both kinds of projects, will talk about the differences, and what we can learn from majority-female open source projects.
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In the lands where the camel roams, the white (albino) camel is a rare and revered individual. The White Camel Awards recognize the many significant contributions made by the unsung heros of the Perl community. The efforts of these volunteers collectively make the Perl language and the Perl community better for all of us.
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